Computing devices may be equipped with one or more high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) that provide high performance with regard to computations and graphics rendering. Computing devices may use a GPU to accelerate the rendering of graphics data for display. Examples of such computing devices may include a computer workstation, mobile phones (e.g., smartphones), embedded systems, personal computers, tablet computers, and video game consoles.
Rendering generally refers to the process of converting a three-dimensional (3D) graphics scene, which may include one or more 3D graphics objects, into two-dimensional (2D) rasterized image data. In particular, GPUs may include a 3D rendering pipeline to provide at least partial hardware acceleration for the rendering of a 3D graphics scene. The 3D graphics objects in the scene may be subdivided by a graphics application into one or more 3D graphics primitives (e.g., points, lines, triangles, patches, etc.), and the GPU may convert the 3D graphics primitives of the scene into 2D rasterized image data.